Why is airline food bad? It’s a plane, Einstein

No one is going to mistake this for the nightly special at Chez Panisse, but that’s not really the point, is it?

Exhaustive study and testing finally has answered a question that has plagued humankind since the Wright Brothers started brown-bagging it: Why is airline food so bad? According to a culinary expert with Lufthansa, quoted in Conde Naste Traveler online, the real reason is simple: It’s the air pressure. And the air. And your dry nose, but that’s because of the air.

Somewhere in Sweden, resting in a velvet-lined case, there’s a Nobel Prize just waiting.

It’s a good thing we can count on the airlines for this stunning revelation that, according to an airline’s expert, crappy airline food is not, in fact, the airlines’ fault. I did a similar study and, after minutes of painstaking research and analysis, was able to come up with an alternate theory as to why airline food is so bad. Stay with me, because this is where it get’s complex:

You’re in an airplane.

It is not the French Laundry. Or Maxim’s. Or even Red Lobster, for that matter. It’s an aluminum tube hurtling through space as efficiently as possible so you can get from Point A to Point B. The hot entrees have been cooked, frozen and re-cooked more often than most Thanksgiving leftovers.

Further minutes of exhaustive study have revealed a few sub-theories as to why the food tends to be lacking:

1) Lowest common denominator food choices. If you survey 10,000 passengers and ask them what they want to eat and how they like it, they’re going to answer with their preferences — for when it’s hot, fresh and served in a spacious dining room. So the airline listens, then picks the most popular two items — but not too spicy or salty or peppery or carb-heavy or too flavorful or too red or too, well, you get the idea. When you try to make everyone happy, you end up with warm shapeless sludge that won’t make anyone happy.

2) Flying can be miserable. Restaurant reviews aren’t just about the cuisine. The atmosphere and service play a huge part in the enjoyment of any meal. Frankly, the atmosphere in the troposphere tends to suck and the service is, well, they’re doing they best they can under circumstances that would leave most of us weeping and catatonic if we had the job for more than a few hours. That just leaves the food, alone, left to fend for itself against 300 grumpy fliers. Even if it was passable cuisine, it never had a chance.

In general, cold dishes and snacks are almost always going to travel better than hot entrees.

3) Not all of it is lousy. I’ve had some very tasty meals (in first class and coach) on Air New Zealand, Emirates Air and Lufthansa, and the cheese-and-fruit box on Virgin America is reliably fresh. There are plenty of other airlines that take pride in their onboard meals, although most of them are based outside the United States.

4) Most passengers are spoiled and entitled. Why is it that the great majority of travelers feel they’re entitled to having every single nanosecond of their lives be completely and flawlessly comfortable? And if something isn’t great, clearly someone else is to blame. Why is it frighteningly likely that more money and time are spent trying to improve airline food than on, oh say, figuring out how to feed starving refugees in Darfur?

(And the best part is that the same rugged, independent travelers who will complain about the rubber chicken or the mystery pasta will proudly and happily wolf down tacos in the streets of Guanajuato in which the “meat” is of questionable taxonomy and was prepared in a garbage can lid using a gardening trowel.)

Only after even more minutes of consideration, did I come up with a surefire way to make food on airplanes much more tolerable: Lower your standards.

Oh, and relax. You don’t really need yet another reason for heartburn.